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Topic: Should Mining scale per Human or per Dollar? (Read 923 times)

I think a core question is, do we want mining to be human scalable or capital scalable.

Current coins including protoshares are capital scalable, you can mine as much as you can spend money. By requiring individual registration, or human-required interrupts like a rotating captcha you make it non-economical to run 3,000 servers if each server has an average 5 interrupts randomly per day. Doesn't matter if it's a cloud miner, doesn't matter if it's botnet, the human element does not scale like the hardware does.

To a certain extent this makes the guy with 40 computers in his garage the hardest working and best paid, requiring constant attention (5 interrupts x 40 divided by 24 hours in the day means an interrupt every 8.3 minutes).

I actually don't hate the idea of random interrupts, it incentivizes people run it on the computer they are actively working on because otherwise they'll be periodically checking at best or waiting for an email alert. One imagines a new suite of tools will emerge to try and automate this, and that becomes the arms race improving captchas.

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Before you say the price of PTS is too high, take a look at theThe Reason. Protoshares are an entirely new type of Cryptocurrency, one that pays to hold.

We actually want humans to be involved and disseminate the goodness of this system. People would loose appreciation and confidence in the system if they can't obtain a proper share. Why would I defend this project if I get 10 shares but some criminal obtained 100000 by violating the computers of thousands of innocents?We do love freedom, but we don't like people who steals from others. Do we?

A DAC that gives some kind of work to humans sounds good. In fact, every DAC now has at least a human behind, caring for some machines and software working for the network.

What I think that would be really good is to expand the types of work that humans do to the network now. Something too hard or impossible for a machine, but doable (not just easy things) for a human. Some ideas:

Recaptcha-like DAC: would provide almost perfect OCR by demand.

Translation DAC: if you need an almost perfect translation reviewed by several native speakers, you want to use/join this DAC.